The present invention relates to mass mail delivery mechanisms and, more particularly, to combined electronic and physical delivery mechanisms.
Many businesses currently send out mass mailings to their customers or prospective customers. For example, a utility, e.g. electric company, may send out hundreds of thousands of bills to its customers every month. As another example, a company may wish to send targeted marketing material, such as a sales letter, to prospective customers on a mailing list. In either example, a company may augment the bill or basic sales letter with additional material called xe2x80x9cinserts,xe2x80x9d for example, a brochure or a glossy advertisement.
There currently exist computer systems, software, and specialized peripherals for producing mass mailings for physical delivery, e.g. through the U.S. Postal Service or by courier. With the advent of new forms of electronic mail delivery, however, it is becoming more desirable to augment existing mass mailing capability with electronic delivery mechanisms, such as by electronic mail (email), facsimile, pager, or publication to a page on the World Wide Web. However, there are many reasons why it is difficult to upgrade or replace these computers systems for electronic mail delivery.
Often these computer systems are called xe2x80x9clegacyxe2x80x9d computer systems because they are relatively old computer systems handed down from previous generations of company management. These legacy computer systems, however, are still effective and often control processing vital to the company""s business, e.g. bill production. Such legacy systems for mass mailing document production typically run on a mainframe computer and are complex and expensive. Accordingly, companies are reluctant to modify, upgrade, or replace these critical document generation applications.
Another reason why upgrading a business application is difficult is that the business application is written by a third-party developer with exclusive access to the source code and unwilling or unable to upgrade the application. For example, the business application may have been written by a company that has gone out of business or discontinued support for that application.
Even if a company has access to the source code of its mass mailing application, the company may not have the resources in terms of time or programming staff to make the necessary modifications for electronic mail delivery.
As an additional complication, electronic mail delivery may take a variety of forms, e.g. email, facsimile, pager. Each electronic delivery mechanism imposes restrictions on the nature of inserts added to the mailing. For example, an alphanumeric pager can only receive a small number of characters.
There exists a need for adding capabilities of electronic mail delivery to existing mass mailing systems. There is also a need for handling inserts in a manner appropriate to the delivery mechanism.
These and other needs are met by an electronic delivery system and method in which a printstream processor separates documents into a physical delivery printstream and an electronic delivery printstream based on delivery preferences stored in a database. A printer prints the physical delivery printstream to create printed documents. A physical inserter generates physical mail pieces including one of the printed documents and, for at least some of the physical mail pieces, respective physical inserts. An electronic inserter splits the electronic delivery printstream into electronic documents and generates electronic mail pieces. Each of the electronic mail pieces includes one of the electronic documents and, for at least some of the electronic mail pieces, an electronic insert. The electronic insert may be a link to a World Wide Web site, a text attachment, a document, or an electronic copy of a physical insert.
A message router delivers the electronic mail pieces via an electronic delivery mechanism specified in the delivery preferences, e.g. to a web server, an electronic mail address, a pager, a facsimile machine, and a printer. Preferably, the message router is configured to deliver an electronic mail piece by one electronic delivery mechanism and a notification message by another electronic delivery mechanism. The system may include a regeneration processor for causing a physical mail piece to be generated, corresponding to an electronic mail piece that has not been delivered.
Another aspect of the invention is a method of mass mailing in which a first batch of print images is received. The method includes determining whether or not each print image is to be delivered physically, in which case the print image is stored in a second batch, or electronically, in which case the print image is stored in a third batch. Preferably, first records indicating a physical delivery address is stored for all the print images of the first batch, and second records indicating an electronic delivery address is stored for all the print images of the third batch.
The software aspects encompass media or carrier waves bearing sequences of computer executable instructions for performing the steps of the invention. A computer readable medium, as used herein, may be any medium that can bear instructions or code for performing a sequence of steps in a machine readable form, such as a floppy disk, flexible disk, hard disk, magnetic tape, any other magnetic medium, a CD-ROM, an other optical medium, a RAM, ROM, PROM, EPROM, FLASH-EPROM, and any other memory chip or cartridge. A carrier wave signal is any type of signal that may carry digital information representative of the instructions or code for performing a sequence of steps. Such a carrier wave may be received via a network, over a modem, or as a radio-frequency or infrared signal, or any other type of signal which a computer may receive and decode.
Additional objects, advantages, and novel features of the present invention will be set forth in part in the detailed description which follows, and in part will become apparent upon examination or may be learned by practice of the invention. The objects and advantages of the invention may be realized and obtained by means of the instrumentality""s and combinations particularly pointed out in the appended claims.